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Summary of the impact

The Digital Classics research group has been instrumental in transforming
the cultural capital of
the ancient world online, through changing the way that information about
the ancient world is
found and can be used. It builds transferable tools and has established a
set of international
standards for exploring and visualising the ancient world online. For
example, Barker's Google
Ancient Places (GAP) project has built an innovative web platform for
reading texts spatially while
the Pelagios network, using the infrastructure of the Internet, links data
from international archives
and museums in creating a world wide web of antiquity.

Underpinning research

Digital Classics is a rapidly growing discipline at the OU with
connections across the Arts Faculty
as well as to a wide range of international higher education institutions.
With external funding from
various government agencies, commercial bodies, and major international
partners, we develop
and use new digital tools for investigating the geography of the ancient
world, changing how
information can be accessed and used. Work focuses primarily on three
ongoing projects.

Hestia uses an innovative methodology for studying the spatial
relations embedded within a
literary text. It was initially funded in 2008-10 by the AHRC, with
follow-on funding awarded from
2013. With Herodotus's Histories as the test case, the team uses
digital technology and develops
web-mapping tools, replacing the usual cartographic representations of
space as points on a map
with an understanding of space as a contact zone of connections between
places and peoples.

Hestia's experimental approach uses:

Geographical Information Systems (GIS), through which users can query
and map all the spatial
data in the text;

Google Earth, which allows users to locate and find out about places
mentioned in Herodotus;

a narrative timeline showing places appearing and `fading from
memory' as the `reader' moves
through the text or along a `timeline' of book chapters.

All data and maps generated are open so interested users, including
schools, can find out about
Herodotus's world for themselves. Our technologies have considerable reuse
potential in other
humanities/social sciences disciplines.

GAP builds on Hestia by developing the means of automatically
finding places not just in a single
text but, in principle, in any text across large text corpora (e.g. Google
Books). It then visualises the
results. It has been funded successively from 2011 under Google's Digital
Humanities Research
Awards.

Using the ancient world as a test case, GAP addresses two primary
concerns related to online
resources: discoverability and usability. Our specialist software tools
identify what places are
mentioned where, and how often, within a given text, and then resolve
those results to a digital
gazetteer, displaying their locations on a map. We have developed an
intuitive reading interface
called GapVis, where users can see at a glance the total distribution of
place references. They can
also move through the narrative and see locations appearing and `fading
from memory', and focus
on individual places including their relationships to other locations
mentioned `in the same breath'.
GapVis is freely available online and extensible to any narrative with
geospatial content.

Funded by successive JISC programmes, Pelagios develops the
infrastructure through which
online material about the ancient world can be brought together. By
developing a common schema
and providing community guidelines for referring to place data, whether
archaeological, literary or
visual, Pelagios enables people or groups (whether academic or
not) to join the network, making
their own resources more discoverable and, therefore, more valuable. In
turn, the Pelagios
network empowers both professionals and the general enthusiast to discover
the cities of antiquity
and explore the rich interconnections between them.

*2008-2010: £66,724 awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC) to E.Barker
(with Bouzarovski, Pelling and Isaksen) for Early Career Fellowship,
`Network, relation, flow:
imaginations of space in Herodotus' History' (Hestia)'.

Details of the impact

Hestia's experimentation with data visualisation has attracted the
interest of cultural heritage
groups and government agencies who need to present big and often messy
data in ways that
make sense to users while neither reducing complexity nor presenting a
misleading picture.
English Heritage, Ordnance Survey and Hampshire County Council all
participated in the Hestia2
July 2013 workshop on using network visualisations to analyse spatial
relationships in data
records.

Hestia's `outreach' potential in using different web-mapping technologies
for reading texts visually
has been documented in two outreach publications (in Amphora, the
American Philological
Association outreach magazine, and Iris schools magazine). Results
from using Hestia in a US
public high school in Virginia, as an example of active learning within a
`lab school', were
presented at `Classics in the Modern World: a Democratic Turn?' at The
Open University in June
2010 (underpinning research item 5). The school students contributed
highly positive feedback,
reflecting on their own learning and suggesting improvements. In July 2013
Hestia partnered with
the Classics Charity Iris and the commercial digital pioneers L-P
Archaeology to use Hestia's
resources for teaching ancient history in state schools in Bolton and
London (1).

Hestia has been presented at a number of prestigious international
meetings to establish best
practice and formulate policy in the Digital Humanities:

the European Science Foundation Standing Committee for the
Humanities Strasbourg
workshop on `Research Communities and Research Infrastructures in the
Humanities' (2);

the European FP7-project NeDiMAH work group on evaluating
visualisation methods and tools
in Digital Humanities research and teaching;

the Scholarly Communications and Information Technology (SCIT) Program
in New York,
funded and organised by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, setting the
Mellon's future strategy
on funding electronic resources for the dissemination and interpretation
of classical texts.

The GAP project's search mechanism—the means by which it
automatically `discovers' places in a
text—has been adopted by the Mellon Foundation-funded Project Bamboo, as
an exemplar text-
mining service for scholars, librarians and information technologists (3).

The GAP project has featured in the media and on a number of influential
blogs (4), attracting
widespread praise for its pedagogical potential. It was also one of four
examples chosen by Google
to be showcased at its June 2012 Geo Teachers Institute in London. GAP has
contributed to the
Amicus Brief compiled by digital humanities scholars and law professors
and submitted in support
of the defendants in the Authors Guild vs. HathiTrust case of the US
Southern District Court of
New York (5). Citing this brief, the trial court ruling found that certain
uses of digitised university
library books to enhance search, scholarship, and access qualify as fair
use, a ruling that
dramatically impacts and enables the future of this work.

Going beyond establishing best practice, Pelagios has been
developing ancient-world web
infrastructure for academic and non-academic data providers alike and has
impact beyond ancient
world data. For example JISC identifies Pelagios's decentralised, open
annotation approach as a
model for future web practice, featuring it in the policy document
`Preliminary highlights from the
JISC Discovery programme' (6). This sets out the plan for future
investment in digital infrastructure
projects, as an example of `greater impact through linking'.

The open-data service technology that Pelagios has championed is now the
de facto international
standard for open linked geospatial data concerning the ancient world.
Impact is measured not just
by the growing number of partners whom Pelagios has attracted but also by
the process that each
group undertakes to become a partner: by adopting the Pelagios system,
partner organisations
must change the way they structure their data. This means that Pelagios's
research has achieved
the impact of transforming the nature of the data held and provided by all
of these organisations,
and the way in which they work and even conceptualise their activity.

In addition to work with the British Library (7) the spectrum of
organisations extends beyond the
academic research community to include: regional and national museums
(e.g. the Ure Museum,
the British Museum); a national database (Arachne); a private learned
society (Nomisma), a digital
library (Perseus); an aggregator service (CLAROS); the government-funded
Portable Antiquities
Scheme (including meetings with staff from the British Museum and
presentations at the Linked
Ancient World Data Institute seminar series in New York (8)); and an
equally diverse array of
voluntary partners and interest groups (Ports Antiques; Regnum Francorum
Online; SquinchPix;
the open-access Ancient History Encyclopedia (9)). Pelagios was the
subject of a keynote
presentation at a meeting of Wikipedia in Germany, for bringing together
scholarly research and
public resources (10).

Letter from Lead Curator, Digital Mapping, British Library: `The
result of our involvement in the
Pelagios research will be to increase access to and expand research use
of our growing digital
collections'.

Letter from ICT Advisor, British Museum: `The Pelagios project has
definitely changed the
working practice and delivery of Portable Antiquities Scheme web
resources and I hope that the
project gets the plaudits that it deserves. The team are dynamic,
helpful and definitely in the
vanguard of linked and open data within the Classical World'.

Letter from Director and Founder of the Ancient History Encyclopedia:
`the Pelagios data
displayed in our atlas is exposed to a huge audience. We also know that
it is being used in
class by many teachers around the globe'.